Arthurian legend

“ Geoffrey can claim, beyond any question, to be the literary father of King Arthur himself as a romantic hero. But the Arthurian legend, as it emerged from mediæval romance and as we know it in its modern presentment by the poets, contains so much more than the story of Arthur that the French romantic scribes who brought Tristan and Lancelot and Perceval into Arthur’s court must be regarded as the first artistic fashioners of a purely poetic “matter of Britain.” ”

“ For some people the study of Arthurian nomenclature is as engrossing a pursuit as the interpretation of ‘The Idylls of the King’ is for others, while there are those who derive as much pleasure from investigating the symbolic meanings of the story of the Grail as lovers of music do from listening to the mighty harmonies of Parzival or Tristan und Isolde. All this only makes us wonder the more why so obscure and elusive a figure as the historical British Arthur should have become the centre of a romantic cycle which presents so many varied and persistent features of interest. ”

“ To thoroughly understand, and to be able intelligently and helpfully to criticise the Arthurian Legend, it is essential that we do not allow ourselves to be led astray by what we may call the ‘accidents’ of the problem—the moulding into literary shape under French influence—but rather fix our attention upon the ‘essentials’—the radically Celtic and folk-lore character of the material of which it is composed. ”

“ ARTHURIAN ROMANCE IN BRITTANY Fierce and prolonged has been the debate as to the original birthplace of Arthurian legend, authorities of the first rank, the ‘Senior Wranglers’ of the study, as Nutt has called them, hotly advancing the several claims of Wales, England, Scotland, and Brittany. ”

“ The review given in this chapter of the earliest Arthurian records,—all of which are in Latin,—as distinguished from Celtic song or fable, points clearly to the gradual growth, around the personality of a real British warrior of the sixth century, of a legend which by the twelfth century had assumed a form that arrested, though it might baffle, the leading historians of the day. Now, it so happened that the twelfth century was the seed-time of mediæval romance in Europe, and how effectively the legend of Arthur was thenceforth exploited for [36] romantic purposes will be seen later on. ”

“ The Arthurian Legend, if not from the very first, yet from the first moment when it assumed vernacular forms, lent itself to that double meaning which, though it is open to abuse, and was terribly abused in these very ages, is after all the salvation of things literary, since every age adopting the first and outer meaning can suit the second and inner to its own taste and need. ”

“ The time has not yet come when a final study of any part of the Arthurian legend, based upon a comparison of all the texts, is possible or indeed desirable. The different threads that form the shifting pattern of the fabric are so interwoven that no one can as yet be disentangled beyond a certain point without injury to the whole. ”

“ Later on in the same century, as Alanus de Insulis records, [41] belief in Arthur’s “return” was so firmly held in the country districts of Brittany that a denial of it might have cost a man his life. Moreover, two chroniclers of repute who wrote before Geoffrey bear clear testimony to the widespread currency of Arthurian traditions in their day, and to the curiosity aroused in serious historians concerning the deeds of the British king. ”

“ Before, however, he and Melwas engage in battle, the monks of the abbey, accompanied by Gildas, intervene; peace is made, and the queen is restored to her lawful husband.
Of the many chroniclers who, either in prose or in verse, repeat and embellish Geoffrey’s Arthurian narrative, by far the most interesting, and the most important in their influence upon the literary development of Arthurian story, are Wace and Layamon. Both are poets, and their metrical Bruts mark, as it were, the transitional stage between the Arthur of history and traditional legend and the Arthur of pure romance. ”

“ Of those two cycles, it is with the latter that the Arthurian legend shows most affinity. [363] Arthur’s position as supreme war-leader of Britain curiously parallels that of Finn’s as general of a “native Irish militia”. His “Round Table” of warriors also reminds one of Finn’s Fenians sworn to adventure. Both alike battle with human and superhuman foes. 315Both alike harry Europe, even to the walls of Rome. The love-story of Arthur, his wife Gwynhwyvar (Guinevere) , and his nephew Medrawt (Mordred) , resembles in several ways that of Finn, his wife Grainne, and his nephew Diarmait. ”

“ He figures largely in the Welsh Triads and in the Mabinogion under the name of Gwalchmei, and in the story of Arthur’s wars as told by Geoffrey he is the king’s most powerful lieutenant. Originally a mythical hero, he was probably the centre of a cycle of traditional stories as old as, if not older than, anything fabled or sung of Arthur. [109] No other knight of the Arthurian court is the hero of so many episodic romances and poems, while there is no more prominent figure in Arthurian literature generally. ”

“ I believe, myself, that the eventual result of criticism will be to establish a position midway between these two points, and to show that though certain of the early Celticists exaggerated somewhat, they were, in the main, correct—their theory did not account for all the varied problems of the Arthurian story, but it was not for that to be lightly dismissed. The true note of the Arthurian legend is evolution not invention ”

“ All who have any real knowledge of the Arthurian cycle are well aware that the Breton lais, representing as they do the popular tradition and folk-lore of the people among whom they were current, are of value as affording indications of the original form and meaning of much of the completed legend, but of how much or how little value has not yet been exactly determined. An earlier generation of scholars regarded them as of great, perhaps too great, importance. They were inclined indiscriminately to regard the Arthurian romances as being but a series of connected lais. ”

“ If he be indeed its author, he is entitled to as high a pedestal in the Arthurian House of Fame as either Geoffrey or Chrétien. The difficulty of accepting his authorship of the work is not so much that he was a very active public man, as that the one book of which he is the indubitable author, the De Nugis Curialium,—a sort of commonplace book in which contemporary history finds a place side by side with fairy tales, and much other odd lore,—does not afford the slightest trace of interest in Arthurian story. ”

“ Again, nearly all the persons mentioned in The Black Book dialogue between Arthur and Glewlwyd figure also in Kulhwch and Olwen. So, where the oldest Welsh Arthurian poetry comes into contact with the oldest Welsh prose, the Arthur that we find dimly outlined in both is a purely mythical hero. ”

“ The Emperor (Lucius Hiberius, called in the Welsh narratives Llês) is said by Geoffrey (Hist. Reg. Brit., X. xi) to have been killed by “an unknown hand.”
[63] Rhys, Arthurian Legend, Ch. II.
[64] The most brilliant of these re-builders of “the Celtic Pantheon” is Sir John Rhys. See, especially, his Arthurian Legend and Celtic Heathendom.
[65] Spenser, Faerie Queene, Bk. I. Canto 9.
[66] Dickinson, King Arthur in Cornwall (Longmans) , p. vi, where an interesting account is given of Arthur’s Cornish associations. ”

“ William obviously was not under the spell of Arthurian legends. [178]
[Pg 132] Wales, Brittany, and Cornwall were the centres where these legends had developed; the Briton harpists had, by the beauty of their tales, and the sweetness of their music, early acquired a great reputation. It was a recommendation for a minstrel to be able to state that he was a Briton, and some usurped this title, as does Renard the fox, in the "Roman de Renart." [179]
One thing, however, was lacking for a time to the complete success of the Arthurian epic: the stamp of authenticity, the Latin starting-point. ”

“ Celtic writers of the present day may be greatly attracted by the later Arthurian legends, and their mythologic connexions, and write on them at great length; but they will not give any of this attention to the historical discussions of the real facts, on which the immense pile of romance has been raised. The fiction occupies twenty times the space of the historical material in the Encyclopaedia. ”

“ Strange indeed, for here among the debris of the lost history of Arthur, that vast shadowy kingly figure whose only kingdom may have been the soul of primitive races, and whose sword may have been none other than the imagination that is for ever on its beautiful and perilous quest, here among that débris of legend scattered backward from the realms of the north across Europe is one, remote as it is, which brings us back to the early astronomical myth which identifies the great Celtic champion with the chief constellation of the north. ”

“ And yet nothing is more “notoriously known” than that authentic historical records of the [2] career of this “most renowned Christian king” are distressingly scanty and indeterminate. An old Welsh bard, who sings of the graves of departed British warriors, and has no difficulty in locating most of them, [1] tells us that “unknown is the grave of Arthur.” [2] Would that this were indeed the sum of our ignorance! To-day, as of old, Arthur remains but a shadowy apparition, clothed in the mists of legend and stalking athwart the path of history to distract and mystify the sober chronicler. ”

“ I have elsewhere spoken of the legendary association of Arthur (the Celtic-British King and the earlier mythical Arthur, semi-divine, and at last remote and celestial) with Arcturus, that lovely Lamp of the North, the glory of Boötes. But now, I may add what there I had to omit.
In all European lands, and above all in the countries of the West, there is none without its legend of King Arthur. The Bretons claim him as theirs, and the places of his passage and exploit are familiar, though only the echo, only the phantom of a great fame ever reached Arvôr. ”

“ Yet one may question whether we are really better off, because for us King Arthur’s Round Table has no existence and Arthur himself is lost in the strange background of
Moving faces and of waving hands,
that weird labyrinth where history and legend, myth and romance, are so strangely and inextricably interwoven; and one turns away baffled and reluctant from many and many an old-world story, and many and many an old-world relic such as this, with the sense of something like a lost inheritance. ”

“ The Arthurian cycle of legends, emerging from Welsh and Breton mythology; seized upon by French romancers of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, who made of Arthur the pattern king, of Lancelot the pattern knight, and of the Table Round the ideal institute of chivalry; gathering about itself accretions like the Grail Quest and the Tristram story ”

“ One cannot read the old chansons de geste in which fighting, and not love, is the absorbing topic, without feeling that the audience before whom they were chanted was predominantly male. One cannot but feel the contrary to have been the fact with the romances in verse and prose which constitute that immense mass of literature vaguely termed Arthurian. ”

“ But though assuredly the poet’s love for the picturesque is in this noble epic—for epic the Idylls in their completed state may be accounted—amply indulged, I think it is seldom to the detriment of the human interest, and the remark I made about one of them, the “Morte d’Arthur,” really applies to all. The Arthur cycle is not historical, as “Harold” or “Queen Mary” is, where the style is often simple almost to baldness; the whole of it belongs to the reign of myth, legend, fairy story, and parable. ”

“ How much we really owe, then, to historic fact and how much to bardic song the accounting of Camelot and Avalon, Tintagel and Almesbury, as the famous and redoubtable spots of Arthurian accomplishments and occupation, would be difficult to decide. Literary genius from the first centres in the minstrel, who is both composer and singer, who stimulates to action and records events, who is himself “doer” and “seer.” ”

“ Arthur has no knight, as is well known, whose fame equals his, but before the flowers bloom again, I shall see, when we come to blows, whether his fame and his deeds are in accord: I only wish it could be settled now!" "Son," says his father, "thou art acting exactly like a fool. Any one, who knew it not before, may learn of thy madness from thy own lips. A good heart truly humbles itself, but the fool and the boastful never lose their folly. ”

“ First there was the old Latin chronicle of Nennius, the earliest trace of Arthurian fact or fancy, with a single paragraph given to Arthur and his twelve great battles. This chronicle itself may have been based on yet earlier Welsh stories, which had been passed on, perhaps for centuries, by oral tradition from father to son, and gradually woven together into some legendary history of Oldest England in the local language of Brittany, across the English Channel. ”

“ The Britons believe yet that he is alive, and dwelleth in Avalon, with the fairest of all elves, and ever yet the Britons look for Arthur’s coming. Was never the man born, nor ever of woman chosen, that knoweth the sooth, to say more of Arthur. But whilom there was a seer hight Merlin; he said with words—and his sayings were sooth—that an Arthur should yet come to help the Britons.”
[95] CHAPTER IV
ROMANCE
Before the close of the twelfth century the Arthur of popular legend, and of the chronicles, had been transformed into a purely romantic hero. ”